College Log - Abstract & Weather (Week 2)

My second week at college focused on using other effects to portray feeling in animation - namely abstract work & weather. Weather is effective at accentuating the feeling of a scene:

• Sun: Things are good, people are happy, everything is going well.

• Clouds: Things are uncertain. Could it rain? Will the clouds clear? Clouds can appear during moments of tension.

• Rain: Things feel melancholic, perhaps sad. Rain after a gathering of clouds is a great way of showing that things have come to a head. Rain is great for hiding tears, or even giving the appearance of crying without making a character cry.

• Snow: Snow dampens sound, makes the ground around seem simple, and the heavier the snow, the less you can see - fantastic for a mystical/mysterious feeling.

There are plenty of options; many of them cross over & some require smart use for best effect. It's not explicitly just weather either - fire, lighting, dust, colour theory, it all contributes to setting up a scene that tells the viewer just what you're trying to portray.

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So what about abstractness? A lot of people get abstract & surreal mixed up.

• Surrealism draws from things we know/understand, then depicts them in a way we don't understand.

• Abstractness doesn't reference what you know/understand & relies on your perception of deliberately placed shapes, colours, etc, to make you feel/think a certain way. You might see a person or feel an emotion from an arrangement of shapes & colours, and an abstract artist's job is to control how you feel/think it.

If this seems confusing, don't worry, even I struggle to fully grasp it - only a few individuals in my class elected to work on it over weather. At some point during the year I'd like to go back and try it for myself, but for the time I wanted to focus on something easier to grasp.

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So what was the assignment? Animate a scene that makes use of weather or abstractness. I chose weather, and within the hour I had whipped up the above gif as proof of concept. Instead of a fully fleshed out animation I wanted to try making a loop of a still that makes the shot feel alive. I've drawn snow & blizzards a few times in the past, with the most notable being "The Wrong Solution" from 2014. At the time I learned a lot about layering the snow to give a sense of depth - out of focus snow in the foreground, large flakes of snow in the midground, and smaller flakes in the background. Depending on how heavy the blizzard is, the more or less flakes should be visible. Working on animated snow is a bit different - you have to figure out the direction & speed the wind is blowing. Then, once you know, you need to keep it consistent. For my own reference, I went back and watched the trailer for Final Fantasy XIV: Heavensward, where the heavy use of snow gave me plenty of ideas.

The feeling I was trying to portray was something quite mysterious & cinematic. Like being trapped in the thick of a blizzard that you can barely see your hand in front of you through, then the snow on the wind subsides momentarily and you see a wall towering above you. It's mysterious, forboding & feels foreign.

Once I had the basic idea in mind, I set about complexities, such as making the character more detailed, so as to make the tail & cloak blowing in the wind to make it look more realistic, or to add a sweeping filter of white in the background to really give the impression of very fine waves of snow carrying on the wind and obstructing view.

The effects ended up rough, but having the desired effect, though I'd like to try actually drawing frames of more explicit snow carrying on the wind in the future, rather than just using a white filter. I took every frame of the filter and created a duplicate, with the first having 25% opacity on the filter, while the second has 33%, making it seem to fluctuate.

With all 3 sets put together, we have this result. It's fairly simple, being a loop of 5 frames, animated on twos (or ones, in the case of the filter in the background switching from 25%-33% opacity).

Unfortunately, due to personal reasons, I only had 3 days to complete this assignment, as well as the next week's assignment. I managed them both - but I had to prioritise the fundamentals of the assignments (in this case, the weather) over the rest of the still. That said, I fully intend to finish it, though it will have to take a back seat to coming assignments. You'll see the fruits of my labour as I work! For now though, here is the current state of it!

- Kristen